The everyday magic of surface tension: “the quality of a liquid that causes the surface layer of that liquid to behave like an elastic sheet.”
HT to my hubby, as usual. He always finds the best stuff.
We’re lying side by side, reading. A book for him, a screen for me.
Me: I want a cupcake.
Him: What? Where’d that come from?
Me: This post I’m reading. See?
I point at the word. CUPCAKE. It looks somehow magical, evocative, as if it were spelled out in actual cupcakes instead of plain old letters of the alphabet.
Me: I think cupcake is one of my ten favorite words.
Him: Hmm. You know, I don’t really like cupcakes.
Pause.
Me: That’s all right, I’ll have yours.
Wonderboy: My hearing aids aren’t working.
Me: Oh, are your batteries dead?
Wonderboy: Huh?
Me: Do you need new batteries?
Wonderboy: What?
Me: Come here, let me check your hearing aids.
Wonderboy: I think my batteries got dead.
(And yes, we can communicate in sign language as well, but during this conversation I was holding a plate in one hand and a giant slice of pizza in the other. Priorities.)
Just one week ago, Jack was in his prime. Ruddy, round-cheeked, he had a cheerful grin for all the world.
Then he went out one night and got lit up.
Now, sad to say, that once sprightly youth has aged before his time. He spends his days on the porch, cantankerously frowning at passersby.
Let this be a lesson to you, children.
“It’s rather an unusual case,” said Madam Chairwoman blandly. “The prisoner is a poet. You will all, I know, cast your minds back to the many poets who have written favorably of our race—’Her feet beneath her petticoat, like little mice stole in and out’—Suckling, the Englishman—what a charming compliment! Thus do not poets deserve specially well of us?”
—from The Rescuers by Margery Sharp
The esteemed and sleek-whiskered Mouse Chairwoman is quoting from “Ballad Upon a Wedding” by Sir John Suckling, one of the English “Cavalier poets,” those dashing, witty, and sensitive 17th-century Carpe Diem fellows who came out in support of King Charles I against Parliament and the Puritans. Suckling wrote a number of plays which I have not read (“The Goblins” sounds interesting) and a good deal of poetry, which his contemporaries seemed to enjoy quite a lot.
Here he is in a portrait by Van Dyck.
Suddenly I see where Johnny Depp found his inspiration for facial hair.
You could rock those long curly locks as well, Johnny. The off-the-shoulder cape, not so much.
“Ballad upon a Wedding” is light and a little snarky and a little bawdy, and reads a bit like a blog entry if blogs were written in meter and rhyme. Here’s the bit Madam Chairwoman liked, part of a description of a young bride:
Her feet beneath her petticoat,
Like little mice, stole in and out,
As if they feared the light:
But oh! she dances such a way
No sun upon an Easter-day
Is half so fine a sight.
And I think this is rather sweet:
O’ th’ sudden up they rise and dance;
Then sit again and sigh, and glance;
Then dance again and kiss:
Thus several ways the time did pass,
Whilst every woman wished her place,
And every man wished his.
But being sweet isn’t really Suckling’s aim in this poem; he’s much more focused on the wedding-night feeling in the air, winkwinknudgenudge, and is also mightily enjoying poking fun at the folks he’s describing—calling out the bee-sting on the bride’s chin is kind of a cheap shot.
As mouse-appreciating poems go, this one doesn’t hold a candle to the work of auld Robbie Burns. And then there’s our favorite book about a poet with a proper appreciation of mice: The Mouse of Amherst by Elizabeth Spires.
(That’s a four-year-old post and contains links to my Amazon Affiliate account, which means if you click through and purchase something I get a small referral fee. I don’t do affiliate links anymore, but I’m not going back through old posts to remove them, so here’s your disclosure notice.)
This week’s Poetry Friday roundup can be found at Wild Rose Reader.
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Once upon a time, there was a very tidy cupboard.
Then along came young Sir Destructalot.
Having wreaked maximum havoc, he paused, well pleased with his efforts…
…and looked around for new frontiers.
Enticing prospects beckoned at the far corners of his world, but first he would have to figure out how to bridge a perilous gap.
Triumph! And now bravely through the tunnel he strode, scoffing at those who would take the more conventional route around the table.
Eagerly he made for the row of tempting treasures on the shelf, their bright colors practically begging him to pull them free of their wooden prison.
But just as his massive fist reached the first jewel-toned, delectably gummable beauty, the Voice of Doom sounded from above.
He would have to seek other bounty.
Undaunted, he set forth in a new direction. No Voice of Doom could quell his spirits. There was a great wide world out there for the grabbing,
and he had just the fists for the job.
What I should probably try to chronicle tonight is how Jane, Beanie, and I came to the conclusion this morning that Plutarch is garlic. (That’s a compliment.)
But it’s late, and I only have a few minutes here, and the pieces of today that might disappear if I don’t write them down are small moments, not big conversations.
Teenagers playing Rock Band in my living room with abandon and zest; I loved that.
Rilla screaming, squealing, shrieking, scurrying the loop of kitchen and living room, daring (begging) one of our visitors—a tender-hearted eleven-year-old who is wise in the ways of big-brotherhood—to chase and chase her but never catch her.
Wonderboy “reading” to Rose and me, ten minutes on a bare title page, a long story rattled so quickly we couldn’t comprehend more than a word here and there: “letters,” “fence,” “tomorrow.” Then suddenly, mid-sentence, the book is flung aside and his arms go around me, straw head pressing my cheek. “Mmmm, I wub you!” Oh, oh, oh, catch this moment and hold it forever.
And this one too.
Well, my day went something like this:
Drove to children’s hospital for Wonderboy’s appointment with our favorite specialist, the esteemed yet down-to-earth doctor of genetics. Only one of my boy’s many many physical anomalies seems to be genetic—the albinism—but Dr. J is also a dysmorphologist, which means she takes an interest any kind of birth defect or abnormality, whether its origins are chromosomal or developmental-in-utero. She’s the doctor who laughed at my possibly insulting analogy two years ago, when I said that dealing with specialists in so many different departments of the hospital was like trying to walk a bunch of dogs all pulling on their leashes in different directions.
“I’m sure it is,” she chuckled, earning my affection forevermore.
So I was looking forward to this appointment, even if it did cost Scott a day of vacation: he took the day off to ferry other children to other activities while I took the boys to see Wonderful Dr. J.
I arrived a tad bit early and found a good parking space in the garage down the street from the hospital. Our children’s hospital is a large complex with many buildings and it can be quite confusing to navigate, but I’d double-checked on the website this morning to make sure the Genetics Clinic was still where it had been last year.
(Ooh, foreshadowing.)
So into the clinic area we went, where the line was already beginning to snake, although it wasn’t yet 9 in the morning. And when we got to the front of the line, the nice check-in lady said, “Oh, I’m sorry, but the genetics clinic has moved.”
To a building approximately 714 blocks away. Or six, at least.
“You could walk,” she said doubtfully, “but you’ll probably want to move your car to the lot on Frost Street. It’s a pretty long walk.”
Since “moving the car” would have involved the whole lengthy process of unbuckling boy and baby from the double stroller and rebuckling them into carseats, I opted for the long walk.
Except it needed to be a long jog or else I’d be really late for the appointment.
I saw a shuttle bus and showed the driver my map, helpfully marked in green highlighter by the apologetic check-in lady, but he too was apologetic. “Sorry, we don’t go near that building.”
Which was a rather emphatic demurral, don’t you think? We don’t go near it? How far away could it be, if the shuttle bus doesn’t go near it? Or is it perhaps radioactive? Should I don a hazmat suit before approaching the site?
At any rate, it was clear my options had dwindled to: jog. I lasted about two blocks before my jog muscle cried uncle. And here I thought I was getting into shape with all the exercise-bike-riding I’ve been doing at the gym since we joined the Y. I guess the difference is the exercise bike doesn’t involve pushing a stroller containing a scrawny five-year-old and a nine-month-old the size of a side of beef.
(You could hide pennies under those chins.)
So I walked and pushed and jogged and pushed, and there was a hill with a great deal more on the going-up side than the rolling-down side, and finally I saw a sign for the building that holds the fancy new clinic, and with much huffing and puffing, I delivered Wonderboy and his brother, the exceptionally cute side of beef, to the reception area.
The check-in lady at this clinic was embarrassed about the wrong directions on the website. I’m not the first parent to have been misdirected, it seems. “We keep calling them about it…” We—the embarrassed check-in lady and I—agreed that They (whoever they are) should have to make the walk themselves, once for every time a family arrives late and sweaty as a result of having put their trust in the website directions.
And eventually we got to have our appointment with Wonderful Dr. J. Who is, like every other doctor we’ve seen in buildings all over that sprawling medical complex and elsewhere, utterly baffled by our most pressing and persistent Wonderboy-related question, which has to do with his being the opposite of a side of beef (despite a hearty appetite). He’s been tested for everything the docs can think of, from cystic fibrosis to allergies to celiac disease to pancreatic something-or-other. But that’s a saga for another day. The topic of today’s anecdote is not My Child Is a Medical Mystery; it’s I Had to Take a Long Walk with My Two Adorable Sons in the Beautiful San Diego Weather, Poor Poor Me.
And the sequel, They Wouldn’t Validate My Parking in the New Clinic, So I Had to Go All the Way Back to the Old Clinic to Get My Ticket Stamped, O Woe.
What, you aren’t reduced to tears of overwhelming pity by this tale? Hmph. Um, um, well, I also had a dentist appointment in the afternoon. There. Now I’ve got you.
Oh, fine. It was actually quite a nice day. Okay? Are you satisfied? The girls got extra daddy time, and (for some) a trip to Jiffy Lube where there was an arcade machine containing all the best games of the 80s. The Jiffy Lube Man said kids played free and gave them a stack of quarters. And Scott bought them donuts. Two days after Halloween, with the candy still flowing freely: this was a very good day for my daughters. Jane wasn’t part of the video/donuts funstravaganza, but her science lab is moving into a chemistry unit and she came home radiant with excitement. Chemistry is Jane’s thiiiiing, to quote Little Bill’s father.
(We quote members of Little Bill’s family quite a lot around here. Especially Alice the Great. That Alice the Great is one of the best characters on television. Wise, twinkling, mellow, kind, observant, gentle, shrewd. And comfortable in her pink sweater and sneakers. I love her. This is going to sound ridiculous, but I have actually thought more than once, Gosh, she’s getting old. I hope she doesn’t die. And then I remember she’s a cartoon.)
Later in the day there was a long stretch of singing folk songs on the couch with the four youngest children, Bonny Doon and Loch Lomond and all my Scottish favorites, and also Down in the Valley which I still remember my grandma singing in her kitchen with two skillets sizzling on the stove and a spatula in her hand, and the smell of fried chicken livers filling the room, best smell in the world, and a plate of fried okra steaming on the counter, grease soaking into a paper towel, hear the wind blow, dear, hear the wind blow.
I bet Alice the Great makes good fried okra.
Our little singalong was underscored by a fair amount of kid-squabbling, the usual “I wanna sit next to Mom” scuffles, but that’s just the percussion section of life, keeping the tempo lively. I just sing “You take the high road” a little more loudly, arching an eyebrow at the oldest child in the squabble. This is probably not nearly as amusing to the intended recipient of my wit as it is to me.
Much like this post. What can I say? Writing long, nonsensical posts for my own amusement is my thiiiing.
Because I sliced my thumb and forefinger while washing a knife this afternoon (nothing serious) and don’t feel like doing much typing.
And because you can’t ever go wrong, can you, posting pictures of scrumptiousness like this?
Yesterday he managed to snag a bottle of barbecue sauce out of the fridge and I thought Ohhhh, baby, you don’t want to put ideas in people’s heads…I already want to eat you all up.